St. Stephen's

NSF Day 2: Cracking codes and capturing creativity

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The second day at St. Stephen’s National Science Fest started with the interdisciplinary Competition of Young Scientists and Enthusiasts (CYSAE). 12 teams started off in the competition, out of which 8 moved on to the second round. The second round comprised of programming problems and required participants to design algorithms in any programming language. With the ability to approach a maximum of five problems in one hour, six teams moved on to the final round on the basis of the same. In the final round, while four teams were from Stephen’s, the other two were from Hansraj College and IIT Delhi. In the final round, the six teams were supposed to first choose between Physics and Chemistry, and then solve a set of five questions based on that subject in the span of one hour. The final results of the competition are still awaited.

sysae round3
Students solving Physics problems in the final round of CYSAE.

The initial events of the day also had a Scientifik Exhibition on Innovative Practices for the Conservation of Natural Resources judged by Dr. Kinkini Dasgupta Misra, from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. Out of the 5 contenders, the team from Army Public School was declared the winning team.

Moving from academia, the day also witnessed a General Science Quiz prepared by the Quiz Society of the college and conducted by Debobrato Sen Sharma and Akshit Goyal of the St. Stephen’s Quiz Society. 18 teams competed in a written preliminary round, out of which 7 teams moved on to the finals. The quiz had 42 questions coming from different scientific fields. The first position was obtained by a mixed team from Stephen’s and Hindu College, comprising of Ayan, Prerna and Rahul. However, an all Stephen’s team of Rabin, Sukrita, Surabhi bagged the second position. Talking about his favourite question in the quiz, Debobrato says, “We had a question where we told people about the characteristics of a spider and showed them a picture of the same. An additional fact was that the name of the spider was inspired by a character from the Jungle Book. Many people worked it out, despite seeing it for the first time.”

In Kapture, a digital imaging competition, students were given two hours to go around the campus, click photographs and then edit them on digital editing software to create their entry for the competition. 15 teams competed to create images under the theme The Dark side of St. Stephen’s. Andriyas A. Silas and Zoya Singh of St. Stephen’s won the competition in an entry that reflected towards an existing gender bias.

The Winning Entry at Kapture – Photography and Digital Imaging event.

Another fun event of NSF was ‘Absurd Theory’ – a competition about presenting theories and backing them up by scientific reasoning. The winning theory of the competition was presented by Mitrajyoti Ghosh of St. Stephen’s College. Mitrajyoti in his theory went on to propose that human kind existed on the planet before dinosaurs. Talking about absurd theories, he says, “Absurd Theory to me is about the fun in science. It shows that a scientific temperament can be applied to any situation. The fun of theorical science is that you don’t necessarily have to think of the big questions. Even the small questions can give you a lot of scope for imagination!”

Apart from the competitive events, the day also had talks on Wavelets and Quantum Mechanics in sessions with Dr. Prasanta Panigrahi of Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata and Dr. Sameer Sapra of IIT Delhi respectively.

Featured Image: Dr. Prasanta Panigrahi

Former Web Editor at DU Beat, Gurman loves everything about the web and new media. Technologically obsessed at heart, anything related to gadgets, Android and keynotes is bound to give her an adrenaline rush. Tweets at @GurmanBhatia.

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